Surfer is a contouring and 3D surface mapping software program that runs under Microsoft Windows. The Surfer software quickly and easily converts your data into outstanding contour, surface, wireframe, vector, image, shaded relief, and post maps. Virtually all aspects of your maps can be customized to produce exactly the presentation you want using Surfer’s software tools. Producing publication quality maps has never been quicker or easier.

Features

Map Projections

Load maps in any map projection, and convert between projections.

Surfer now supports map projections! Choose from an endless list of coordinate systems for your map to display. Specify the source coordinate system for each of the layers in your map, and choose to display the map in any other coordinate system! For example, load data and grid files in UTM or State Plane coordinates, and display the map in Latitude/Longitude coordinates! It is simply that easy! Save the coordinate system information for your grid to an external file for future reuse.

Contour Maps

Surfer software’s contour maps give you full control over all map parameters.

You can accept the Surfer intelligent defaults to automatically create a contour map, or double-click a map to easily customize map features. Display contour maps over any contour range and contour interval, or specify only the contour levels you want to display on the map. And with the Surfer software you can add color fill between contours to produce dazzling displays of your maps, or produce gray scale fills for dramatic black and white printouts.

Contour Map Features

Automatic or user-defined contour intervals and ranges

Full control over contour label format, font, frequency, placement, and spacing

Drag contour labels to place them exactly where you want them

Automatic or user-defined color for contour lines

Color fill between contours, either user-specified or as an automatic spectrum of your choice

Save and retrieve custom line styles and fills for contour maps

Full control over hachures

Regulate smoothing of contour lines

Reshape contour lines

Blank contour lines in areas where you don’t want to show any data

Specify color for blanked region

Rotate and tilt contour maps to any angle

Add color scale or distance scale bars

Independently scale in the X and Y dimensions

Full control over axis tick labels, tick spacing, grid lines and titles

3D Wireframe Maps

Use color zones, independent X,Y,Z scaling, orthographic or perspective projections at any tilt or rotation angle, and different combinations of X, Y and Z lines to produce exactly the surface you want. Drape a color-filled contour map over a wireframe map to create the most striking color or black-and-white representations of your data. The possibilities are endless.

3D Wireframe Map Features

Display any combination of X,Y, and Z lines

Use automatic or user-defined color zones to highlight different Z levels

Stack any number of 3D surfaces on a single page

Optional hidden line removal

Overlay any combination of contour, filled contour, base, post, and classed post maps on a surface

Views of the top or bottom of the surface, or both

Proportional or independent scaling in the X,Y, and Z dimensions

Full control over axis tick marks and tick labels

Add a base with optional vertical base lines

Display the surface at any rotation or tilt angle

Vector Maps

Instantly create vector maps in Surfer to show direction and magnitude of data at points on a map.

You can create vector maps from information in one grid or two separate grids. The two components of the vector map, direction and magnitude, are automatically generated from a single grid by computing the gradient of the represented surface. At any given grid node, the direction of the arrow points in the direction of the steepest descent. The magnitude of the arrow changes depending on the steepness of the descent. Two-grid vector maps use two separate grid files to determine the vector direction and magnitude. The grids can contain Cartesian or polar data. With Cartesian data, one grid consists of X component data and the other grid consists of Y component data. With polar data, one grid consists of angle information and the other grid contains length information. Overlay vector maps on contour or wireframe maps to enhance the presentation!

Vector Map Features

Define arrow style, color, and frequency

Symbol color may be fixed or based on vector magnitude

Display map scales, color scale bars, and vector scale legends

Scale the arrow shaft length, head length, and width

Control vector symbol origin

Choose from linear, logarithmic, or square root scaling methods

Image Maps

Surfer image maps use different colors to represent elevations of a grid file.

Create image maps using any grid file format: GRD, DEM, SDTS DDF, GTOP30 HDR. Surfer automatically blends colors between percentage values so you end up with a smooth color gradation over the map. You can add color anchors at any percentage point between 0 and 100. Each anchor point can be assigned a unique color, and the colors are automatically blended between adjacent anchor points. This allows you to create color maps using any combination of colors. Any color fill you choose for an image map can be used with any other image map, even if the associated grid files cover distinctly different Z ranges. Image maps can be created independently of other maps, or can be combined with other maps. They can be scaled, resized, limited and moved.

Image Map Features

Pixel maps or smoothed images

Dither bitmaps if needed

Create an associated color scale

Create custom color spectrum files for use on any image or shaded relief map

New Features in Surfer 12

Download Free Online Maps

More information is now at your fingertips. Download image layers from hundreds of free online Web Map Services (WMS) through Surfer’s new, integrated WMS browser. Connect to online data sources, pick the layers of interest you want to download, and Surfer seamlessly downloads and imports the images into your projects.

Grid and Display Maps with Log Z Scaling

Effectively display Z data that range over several orders of magnitude! You can grid data taking the log of the Z value prior to gridding, choose to have logarithmically scaled contour levels, or have logarithmic scaling applied to the color scale. This is extremely useful when your data file has extreme data ranges, such as concentration data where the Z values can span multiple orders of magnitude (i.e. > 1 to < 20000).

Post Map Enhancements

Create your post maps the way you want them! Many new enhancements have been made to post and classed post maps so that you can create the map you envision. Add multiple labels to points, connect the points with a line, and use the symbol color as the label font color, just to name a few.

Post maps also offer the ability to color the symbols using a column in the data file of either numeric values (and you can choose a color gradient to apply to the data range) or discrete color names. Classed post maps offer the option to apply a color gradient to the symbols, apply a gradational size to the symbols, and set the symbol properties for all symbols at once.

Creating just the right map of your point locations is better than ever!